It seems to hold true, over and over again, that the best solution to a given conundrum lies right in the middle of the more extreme solutions. So, in my case, the case of the pickup covers that didn't want to fit, on the one extreme I had hand-sanding with tiny little 1/4" strokes for 6 days and on the other I had breaking out the Routerbeast to remove 1/8" of material while attempting to not destroy the entire body. Right there in the middle, hiding in plain sight, was the Dremel with a sanding drum. Worked a treat, mission accomplished in about 30 minutes. I don't have pictures of that because I was kind of "in it", sanding - fitting - sanding - fitting - sanding - fitting, but yeah, that's the way to go.
I made a shim out of 8 layers of card stock cut progressively shorter to provide a taper and glued together. I use a glue stick for that to keep things tidy and avoid excessive glue thickness. I ended up with 0.050" on the thick end, and essentially 0.0" on the thin end as I let the taper run out to the bare wood at the end of the pocket.
Very happy with it, geometry is just right! Action is 4/64" on the treble side, 5/64 on the bass side, and the bridge is nice and low. High enough that it is not sitting flat on the thimbles, but comfortably on the low end of the adjustment span. Still more setup and dialing in to be done, but definitely in a good spot.
Installed Mastery's string tree (shhh, don't tell Cagey!), I really dig it. The mounting screw was crazy long though, had to check and re-check and double re-check the masking tape depth marker on the drill bit before committing to that one. Went in without any trouble and looks great. Also does an admirable job of increasing break angle over the nut and eliminating sympathetic vibration :icon_biggrin:
Lo and behold, she is no longer a pile of parts in various stages of assembly. Today, she is a guitar!
She sounds AWESOME. Exactly what was in my head. I sat down to do a bit of functional check-out before I had done anything even remotely resembling setup work, and still managed to pass about an hour before forcing myself to get back to work. I am really happy that I ended up going with these Rumplestiltskin pickups. They are exactly what I was wanting from the ones I was going to wind. I do still intend to wind pickups for it, but spending time with these is going to help me set an excellent reference point.
You may or may not recall from earlier in this thread that I wired this guitar in a non-traditional way: the pickup selector is still functional when the rhythm/dark circuit is engaged. I had no idea if it would be great or if it would be awful. I can officially say I am loving the bridge pickup in the rhythm circuit! Not muddy at all, just a nice smokey bluesy kind of sound that absolutely cooks. It makes me play Cramps songs. Which is never a bad thing.
Still some ongoing setup stuff to be done: need to work on the nut and the intonation, made a couple of truss rod moves and need to see where that settles out. But for all intents and purposes this is a done Jazzmaster!
